I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  It was a move that determined the course of Richard’s life. Now 77, he is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on Ethiopia. Author of more than a score of ground-breaking histories of the country, founder of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, his expertise has made him a regular contributor to international symposiums and research journals so obscure, he wryly observes, ‘they are probably read by no more than twenty people’.

  The former eugenics baby–who only became aware of this quirky claim to fame when he had emerged from childhood and was thankfully immune to teasing–could really be no other woman’s son. His face has the same droop as Sylvia’s: gravity working overtime. Like her, he seems more at ease in the realm of the concrete than the emotional. Discussing Ethiopian history, he rattles off thoughts at machine-gun speed, but ask him about his mother’s frame of mind on moving to Addis and he flounders, suddenly lost, as though the question has no meaning. He has inherited her capacity for the dogged campaign, sustained across the decades: the most recent has been the fight to return to Axum one of the great obelisks Mussolini seized as war booty and used to decorate a Roman square.

  There the similarities begin to peter out. Richard, one suspects, is rather more fun than Sylvia can ever have been. Endowed with the blinking diffidence of the shy Englishman, he has a habit of twitching his lips spasmodically, as though controlling an urge to laugh. The last time we met, he recounted with impish amusement how he and his wife Rita, who divide their time between Ethiopia and Britain, had attended an Italian official reception in London as honoured guests one evening, delicately failing to mention they would be leading a demonstration outside the embassy the following week. ‘We thought best not to tell the ambassador we would be manning the picket line.’ He lacks Sylvia’s stridency. Perhaps the slightly distant gaze of academia militates against his mother’s brand of white-hot fury. If a significant part of his work has been dedicated to defending Sylvia’s role in history, he is too subtle not to acknowledge some of her failings. ‘We were always criticizing her for being too admiring of the Emperor. If she’d lived longer, I think she might have expressed doubts. But it came down to the anti-chauvinism on which her radicalism was based, the rejection of British colonialism that went to the heart of her work. “My job is to criticize my own government,” she used to say. “As for criticizing the Ethiopian government, that’s up to the Ethiopians.”’

  It was Richard who, reading systematically through the Ethiopia archives at the Public Record Office in the late 1990s, stumbled across a set of files that cast Britain’s behaviour in Eritrea in a completely new light.25 What had happened in Eritrea had been the tip of the iceberg, this correspondence made clear. A decade before they were to address identical issues in Eritrea, the British officials who occupied Ethiopia in the wake of Mussolini’s defeat had already established how to handle Italian assets in the Horn. The approach could best be summarized, to use a colloquial expression, as: ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme.’

  Just as they had poured investment into Eritrea, the Italians had not stinted during the brief five years their Abyssinian folly lasted, constructing hospitals and hotels, post offices and telephone exchanges, factories and aqueducts. A giant car repair works which could service 6,000 vehicles a year, the finest flour and biscuit factory in Africa, an oxygen plant that could produce 400 cubic metres of gas a day, a state-of-the-art cotton mill: the assets were scattered across Ethiopia. British military officials took one look at the spanking new machinery, rubbed their hands, and decided it was almost all surplus to local requirements.

  Just five days after Italy’s official surrender on November 27, 1941, General H Wetherall, commander-in-chief for East Africa, sent a telegram to the War Office in London listing the Italian factories he wanted packed up and dispatched to Britain’s colonial dependencies. In the following days, the country’s 11 most important factories were all neatly categorized under three columns: those ‘capable of being moved’, those which ‘probably’ should not be moved because of their contribution to Ethiopia’s economy, and those which definitely should ‘not be moved’ because the effort would not be worth the candle.

  The British justified the operation on several grounds. With the war against Nazi expansionism still raging in North Africa and the Middle East, Britain was struggling to cover the cost of its military operations. It was only right and proper, surely, that all surplus assets, especially those paid for by a former enemy, should go to lightening London’s financial burden. ‘It is essential that we should not waste any possible source of either machinery or labour. Abyssinia represents in this respect a wasting asset,’ explained the Intendant-General in Addis Ababa. With skilled Italian workers in Ethiopia scheduled for deportation, the factories would, in any case, swiftly grind to a halt, as Ethiopians had ‘by universal report…no mechanical aptitude’. Like an acquisitive mother muttering ‘oh, he’ll only break it’ as she snatches a gift from her bawling infant, the British told themselves such munificence would only go to waste in a backward nation.

  The argument begins to crumble as soon as you examine the list of items the British authorities asked the Emperor to requisition on their behalf. While shipping crankshaft grinders to Libya made sense–they were used to repair damaged tanks–it is hard to see how sending road-making equipment to India, a brick factory to Nairobi and an oxygen plant to Uganda served any military purpose. Rather than repositioning the Italian plants nearer the North African war zone, the British administrators actually proposed moving them further away, to British Somaliland, Kenya, South Africa and Pakistan.

  Soon the original list of 11 factories was being dramatically expanded, irrespective of the likely impact on locals. Removing the oxygen plant, one memorandum from a meeting of the British Military Administration in Addis Ababa made clear, would force Ethiopia’s hospitals to go without the life-saving gas. No matter–the plant was slated for removal. One brigadier suggested stationery supplies be spared as the Ethiopian government would find it ‘extremely difficult’ to locate any writing paper once the city’s printing works have been dismantled–he was overruled. By the end of 1941, with the first batch of factories already on their way out of Ethiopia, British officials turned their attention to the CONIEL electricity plant, although their own experts warned its loss ‘would be a great blow to Ethiopia’. The inventory of items selected for requisition would eventually fill 16 pages, embracing soap-making equipment and diesel tractors, bridges and fleets of trucks, water-boring works and oil-pressing concerns, saw mills and mining machinery.

  Originally, the British had said they would pay the Ethiopian government for the dismantled property. Now, with the wind in their sails, they denied ever making such a promise, although the damning phrase ‘acquire by purchase’, underlined in red crayon, screams out from the correspondence. As word of the free-for-all spread around the empire, everyone wanted a piece of the action, with competition at its keenest between the military establishments in Cairo and Nairobi. So many different British authorities were at one time homing in on Ethiopia–even the military department in India demanded its share–British officials considered assigning a special officer to deal with ‘officers arriving in Addis looking for things they want to take away’.

  While Ethiopia’s sale of the century was being held, the Emperor did not stand meekly by. But Haile Selassie’s leverage was limited. He owed the British–who had granted him exile in Bath, beaten the Italians and, however grudgingly, reinstated him as ruler–a great deal. In exchange for having Ethiopia’s independence officially recognized, he had signed a convention obliging him to ‘requisition and hand over to the British forces any private property…which may be required’. With his country still full of armed British soldiers, open defiance hardly seemed wise. Nonetheless, as the dismantling accelerated, Haile Selassie began to remonstrate with increasing force. ‘Emperor and ministers are seriously perturbed and former has now twice spoken to me on the matter of fact
ories,’ wrote a British official in the capital, complaining that he was being caused ‘serious embarrassment’. Finally, in February 1942, the Emperor took the risky step of ordering his officials in Jimma to prevent a sisal rope factory being dispatched to Kenya. Faced with the strong possibility of an armed clash between their troops and a supposed ally, the British ordered their convoy commander to hold off.

  During the diplomatic standoff that ensued, Robert Howe, the British Minister in Addis Ababa, was ordered to step in and sort the problem out. During an audience with the Emperor, he delivered a list of outstanding British requisition items–a radio transmitting station, road-making equipment, a cement factory–before delivering the ultimate threat. If His Majesty did not comply, Britain was ready to think again about granting Ethiopian independence. The Emperor, Howe noted, ‘appeared rather shattered by my plain speaking’.

  Although he had behaved like a bullying landlord softening up a tenant who has fallen behind in the rent, Howe was actually sympathetic to the Ethiopian cause. It was time for this to stop, he told his superiors. Once outstanding items had been handed over, he recommended Britain make no further demands. ‘Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this matter there is no doubt that the Ethiopians have got it firmly fixed in their heads that the British army have plundered the country, and I use the expression advisedly,’ he told London. ‘They estimate that we have removed 80 per cent of the equipment with which the Italians lavishly endowed this country. They point to one item alone of medical stores to the value of £4m which was removed.’ His analysis of why the Ethiopians were so upset shed devastating light on establishment prejudices. ‘The sight of the removal of all this valuable material from this country has touched them in their most Semitic spot. In this respect, the Emperor is more Semitic than most Ethiopians.’ If the Ethiopians balked at being robbed by their liberators it was only, the reader is led to understand, because they had all the money-grabbing instincts of the grasping Jew.

  Despite Howe’s ultimatum, the Emperor’s resistance had had its effect. The best of the Italian equipment had already been removed, in any case, as a result of what British officials now openly referred to in their letters as a ‘scorched earth policy’. A telegram to headquarters from a British officer in Yavello, southern Ethiopia, gives some idea of how thoroughly the task had been carried out. ‘HAVE WITH DIFFICULTY PREVENTED STRIPPING HOSPITAL ROOF YAVELLO DESPITE OCCUPATION BY ETHIOPIANS,’ it reads, before putting in a plea on behalf of a fort housing Ethiopian policemen. ‘FEEL DOORS WINDOWS ROOFS SHOULD BE LEFT.’ Sizing up the dregs that remained, the British pondered whether it was worth risking another awkward incident and decided against. ‘You may write off Ethiopia as a source of supply of any plant or machinery,’ a high-ranking British official told the Minister of State in Cairo in August 1942. ‘However unfortunate this may be I am sure it is no use pressing any further.’

  The eight-month looting spree had ended. During that period, the British had broken international law, come close to clashing militarily with the very regime they had returned to power and removed 80 per cent of the country’s Italian assets without paying a penny in compensation to either of the two affected parties. ‘Ethiopia didn’t get a cent and there is no record of the Italians ever getting a cent either,’ says Richard Pankhurst.

  London had taken a huge risk, and pulled it off. Miraculously, no Italian or German newspaper ever got hold of the story. As the US consul in Asmara told Washington, news of Ethiopia’s treatment would have been enough to make any country think twice about surrendering to the Allies: ‘Happily the Axis propaganda experts do not know this, for if they did, they would be shouting it to the heavens,’ he wrote. ‘Goebbels could now point to Ethiopia and say to the people of Norway, Belgium, Holland, France, Poland, and Greece, “If the United Nations win, they will treat your country as enemy territory, just as Great Britain treated Ethiopia. Look at Ethiopia and be warned! When the British got through with it, what was left?”’26 There was so little adverse comment, a British Ministry of Information publication on the Horn actually felt free, in 1944, to sneer at the enemy on the topic of military appropriation: ‘When you occupy a territory, if you are not an Axis power, you do not requisition all you see regardless of humanity and individual rights,’ wrote its author, KC Gandar Dower.27

  But in the long term, London had scored a devastating own goal. Ethiopia had been treated with humiliating contempt, its plans for a post-war resurgence dealt a shattering blow. ‘It clearly didn’t help Ethiopia to be deindustrialized at that stage of its development. It essentially had to start again,’ comments Richard Pankhurst. Haile Selassie was not the type of leader to forget. His suppressed fury over the affair–just one expression of a wider phenomenon of British highhandedness in Ethiopia–ensured that once he was free to choose his friends, the Emperor looked elsewhere. Britain, which had competed so energetically at the turn of the century with its European rivals for a foothold in the Horn, found the door to Ethiopia slammed in its face.

  What explains such ungenerous behaviour? Richard Pankhurst attributes it to a massive failure of imagination by men who brought to Addis the unreflecting arrogance developed while running Britain’s African empire. Twenty years before most British colonies on the continent would be granted independence, the notion of an autonomous African state ruled by an Emperor enjoying supreme powers, rather than the limited authority doled out at London’s discretion, was anathema. ‘The British officials who came here had served before in Sudan, Kenya and Uganda. Many had been colonial governors. They had a whole load of racist assumptions, values so implicit they didn’t even need to write them down. The idea of an independent African state was an anachronism, so why give anything to an anachronism?’

  This was not Britain’s traditional zone of influence, and these men felt none of the avuncular–if patronizing–concern they extended towards the subjects of their own African territories. At the back of British officials’ minds, one suspects, was the pragmatic awareness that an industrialized Ethiopia would represent a serious commercial challenge to Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. Grabbing a God-given opportunity to furbish British territories with equipment their own government could not afford, administrators were simultaneously emasculating a potential rival to British-run hubs of economic interest in East Africa.

  But they would never be that honest about their own motivations. Instead, they found philosophical justification in the suspect notion of the ‘overcapitalized state’. Rather than admiring the Italians for the seriousness of their commitment to their African colonies, the British ticked them off–it was so typical of these flamboyant, hot-headed Mediterranean types–for ‘overdeveloping’ the Horn. ‘Both Eritrea and Somalia are specialised hothouse orchids and parasitism is in their blood,’ sniffed Gandar Dower in his leaflet.28 Dismissing Eritrea as a ‘remarkable levitated white elephant’, he commiserated with his government for being lumped with ‘two over-capitalised, bankrupt semi-deserts, which had never been self-supporting and which had never been intended to be self-supporting’.

  ‘They felt there was too much industry here,’ says Richard Pankhurst. ‘This was a native state and it didn’t need this infrastructure. It could be used more effectively elsewhere, and, coincidentally, “elsewhere” meant elsewhere in British-administered territories.’ Argue with sufficient fervour and the most perverse of conclusions begins to sound logical. Rather than crippling Ethiopia and Eritrea for decades to come, the British were actually doing the countries a favour, ridding them of a raft of cumbersome, unwanted technology.

  Like a lost piece locking into place on an unfinished puzzle, Richard’s research completes Sylvia’s work. What seemed bizarre in Eritrea makes perfect sense given what happened in Ethiopia a decade before. Having absorbed the details of British dismantling in Ethiopia, I defy anyone to read Sylvia’s Eritrea on the Eve with sceptical eyes. When it comes to their dealings in the Horn, the British authorities manifestly do not deserve the benefi
t of the doubt.

  Sylvia herself would never know she had been vindicated. On the afternoon of September 27, 1960, an Australian husband-and-wife medical team working at the Princess Tsahai Memorial Hospital, in which Sylvia continued to take an interest, received a distress call. Richard and Rita had left Addis on a camping trip and in their absence, Sylvia had become ill. When Catherine and Reginald Hamlin arrived at the house, they realized Sylvia had suffered a major heart attack and began administering morphia and oxygen. Soon they were joined by two of the Ethiopian royal princesses, who held vigil as the former suffragette lapsed into unconsciousness. ‘As I sat beside her, now and then she squeezed my hand until, after about two hours, she died,’ Catherine recorded in her memoirs.29

  Haile Selassie paid the 78-year-old campaigner a final tribute. The socialist who had in an earlier manifestation argued the finer points of Marxism with Lenin, was given a state funeral at Holy Trinity Cathedral, built to mark the Emperor’s triumphant reinstatement. Before thousands of mourners, including members of the royal family, a rebaptized Walata Kristos (Child of Christ) was honoured with the kind of grandiose eulogy usually reserved for those killed defending the homeland.

  Sylvia’s simple grey marble tomb now lies near the cathedral’s front entrance, not far from a bronze memorial dedicated to the Ethiopian ministers shot by the military regime that ousted the Emperor. She died too soon to see Haile Selassie move from admired reformer to despised reactionary, too soon to see the Eritrean merger with Ethiopia she had supported turn into a hateful farce, too soon to see Ethiopian nationalism rival European colonialism for brutality and horror. The Emperor she venerated lies inside the cathedral, in a vast pink granite sarcophagus that lay empty for a quarter of a century until his lost remains were recovered and could be interred next to those of his empress wife. Empty tombs appear to prey on the Ethiopian mind. In recent years, a rumour has spread that Sylvia’s grey marble slab lies above an empty coffin: Richard, it is whispered, stole to the cathedral late one night and quietly removed his mother’s body, returning it to Manchester for burial in its native soil. It is a story that shows a profound misunderstanding of the commitment made by both mother and son. Neither Pankhurst would want her buried anywhere else. This is her rightful resting place. As the Ras who delivered Sylvia’s eulogy told worshippers: ‘Your history will live forever written in blood, with the history of the Ethiopian patriots…Since by His Imperial Majesty’s wish you rest in peace in the earth of Ethiopia, we consider you an Ethiopian.’